[XeTeX] "new-babel", was: Ancient Greek hyphenation

[Will Robertson]

On 21/04/2007, at 3:51 , Alexej Kryukov wrote:

> Well, my Antomega package does just the same thing, and I think it
> is better than Mem at many aspects :)

Right!
I ran into your package once and promptly forgot about it (Omega was  
before my time). Thanks for your comments!

> That's why, I think, instead of creating a completely new xbabel the
> community should focus on improving existing Babel modules by removing
> some features inherited from very old times which now bring  
> unnecessary
> complexity into typesetting documents not only with XeTeX, but even  
> with
> standard (pdf)latex.

This is interesting, though.
What exactly would a new babel package perform?
I think Bruno is on the right track with wanting to eliminate the  
formatting-changing aspects of the package, since that is pretty  
fragile when you start talking about changing other packages and  
document classes.

I don't write multilingual documents, but it seems to me there's only  
a couple of things required: hyphenation, and optionally font- 
switching. XeTeX's new "auto font switch" idea (in the svn  
repository) should be incorporated. And that should all be bundled up  
in the \foreignlanguage--type commands.

But what have I missed? Because the babel packages can get pretty  
complicated. It looks to me like there's more effect stripping back  
the existing ones than creating new ones from scratch...

Will